Chaos V-Ray for SketchUp

Overview

V-Ray is the rendering engine a great deal of professional architectural and product visualisation passes through, and this is the build that installs directly into SketchUp as a toolbar and a set of panels. The model stays where it is, the materials and lights live in the model file, and rendering happens without any export or scene rebuild.

The engine is physically based throughout. Lights are described in real photometric units, materials carry proper reflection, refraction, roughness and subsurface parameters rather than approximations, and the camera exposes shutter speed, aperture and film sensitivity so a scene can be lit and exposed the way a photographer would rather than by pushing multipliers until it looks right.

Interactive rendering is the practical centre of daily use. A progressive preview refines in a separate window while you move geometry, swap a material or drag a light, and it updates continuously instead of restarting from scratch. When the look is settled, the same scene renders at full quality through either the CPU engine or the GPU engine, which share materials and produce matching results.

The supporting content and output tools are substantial. A material library of several hundred ready made surfaces covers the usual architectural finishes, proxy objects keep heavy vegetation and furniture out of the viewport while still rendering, scattering distributes objects across a surface without placing them by hand, and the frame buffer carries full post processing with exposure, curves, white balance, bloom, glare and lens effects applied to the rendered result and saved with render elements for compositing later.

Key Features

• Rendering engine installed directly into SketchUp with no export or scene rebuild
• Physically based materials with reflection, refraction, roughness and subsurface control
• Photometric lights, sun and sky system, and dome lighting from environment images
• Interactive progressive preview that updates as the model and materials change
• Both CPU and GPU rendering engines sharing the same materials and results
• Material library of several hundred ready made architectural and product finishes
• Proxy objects and scattering for vegetation, furniture and repeated detail
• Render elements output for compositing control after the render
• Frame buffer post processing with exposure, curves, white balance, bloom and glare
• Distributed rendering across multiple machines on a network

What Changed in This Build

• Faster GPU engine performance on current generation cards
• Additional materials added to the bundled library
• Improved denoising quality at low sample counts for interactive work
• Scene load time reduced on models carrying many proxy objects

System Requirements

Processor	Intel or AMD 64-bit with SSE 4.2, 8 cores or more recommended
Memory	16 GB minimum, 32 GB recommended for interior scenes
Graphics	GPU with 8 GB VRAM for the GPU engine, current drivers required
Storage	10 GB for install with the material library
Host	A supported SketchUp version installed before the plugin

Release Details

Full title	Chaos V-Ray for SketchUp
Version string	7.40.02
Publisher	Chaos
Category	CAD and 3D
Licence	Full version, all components included
Platform	Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit
Interface language	Multilingual, 9 interface languages
Archive size	1.94 GB
Mirrors	4 active, all reporting online
Listed	refreshed 6 weeks ago, checked again 40 minutes ago

Installation Notes

• Install SketchUp first. The plugin installer detects the host version and will not offer an install target it cannot find.
• Update your graphics driver before using the GPU engine, since it is the most common source of render failures.
• Save the frame buffer post processing settings with the scene rather than reapplying them on every render.

Before You Start

Read the notes above before running setup. Most of the problems people write in about are covered there, and almost all of them come down to an older version of the same software still being installed, a graphics driver that predates the release, or a security suite quarantining part of the package mid install.

There is no archive password on this or any other entry in the library. If something you downloaded elsewhere claims to come from here and asks for one, it did not come from here. Nothing on this site is behind a survey, a shortener or a countdown either.

If the entry does not match what the page describes, say so on the contact page and include the version string from the release details table. Reports naming a specific version get checked first because the checker can reproduce them straight away.

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